Aligning Your Software Architecture With Your Key Business Objectives and Why Your Business Needs It

Software development projects need to be aligned with your key business objectives. The key business objectives that have the biggest cost to change need to be baked into your core architecture as early in the development process as possible. Key business objectives relating to what the customer is paying for, such as, modularity of components (ex: paying for some components, but not others), performance and scalability, and data accessibility, are a few of a plethora of possible key business objectives that need to be baked into the core-architecture. Failure to do so can double or triple your development costs, leading to months of refactoring and potential customer and revenue loss. In agile environments, this article places importance on ensuring that significant core-architecture decisions are not made too late in the game as the myth of “no upfront architecture in agile” is debunked with real world examples where user stories, while aligned with functional requirements, were not aligned with the key business objectives nor the core-architecture.

Aligning Your Software Architecture With Your Key Business Objectives and Why Your Business Needs It

Software projects need an architecture – a core architecture, but defining that architecture and ensuring it meets the business and technology objectives is a bit more thought out than just doing “architecture”. This article will focus on specific areas in creating a core-architecture as related to key business objectives.

Listing some design patterns and layers for your new system and presenting to the team might have some technical merit, but it isn’t enough if you want to ensure a well thought out and successful software system that meets your business objectives. Architecture isn’t just design patterns, layers, and code design. In fact that’s a very small part of it, if it even qualifies at all. Architecture is more about making very significant decisions that will help ensure the alignment of your completed software with your business and technology objectives.

Creating the right architecture requires business and domain knowledge, product and customer knowledge, research, communication, technological evaluations, technical agility, and expert experience in software development. The decisions made here will shape the final software solution, so your core-architecture really represents these decisions that have been made during this architecture creation phase.

Now, separate this from day to day software development. Teams make “architectural-like” decisions all the time when they determine how to implement specific functionality. Ideas will get tossed around about how many layers of abstraction will be implemented, which design patterns to use, and so forth. Although some would categorize this solely as design, in a general sense this is still architecture, but maybe not your core-architecture. You could certainly say that not all of these design decisions will have a significant impact on the software.

Grady Booch states that “All architecture is design, but not all design is architecture”. He also states that “Architecture represents the significant design decisions that shape a system, where significant is measured by cost of change”

Your core-architecture needs to represent those significant decisions and most importantly of all, they need to be aligned with the business requirements.

Some examples of these significant decisions that become part of your core architecture include technology selection (development languages, frameworks, server platforms, etc), application deployment considerations, and technology considerations for key business objectives.

Some examples of architectural decisions to support technology considerations for key business objectives are as follows:

The system must work on both Oracle and SQL Server databases. -> An ORM tool is selected that will allow the application to easily swap DBMS vendors. The ORM tool that has been selected has been evaluated against other tools and also meets the performance requirements. Using this tool will also lead to faster data layer development time over the alternative tools.

Customers can use and pay for a variety of modules that need to be plugged in at run time. The modules need to work together to share information, but also operate independently if related modules are not available. -> Dependency Injection and Inversion of Control frameworks are evaluated against writing an internal DI/IoC framework, and an approach is selected to control how and when the components get loaded and used. The components will adhere to a specific interface to ensure compatibility and modularity within the system.

The system has to be fast – a single implementation must handle a minimum of 100 customers and 5,000 simultaneous users with no performance degradation. This performance must be maintained with over 100,000,000 database records in the core database tables, and will be measured by… etc… -> Performance considerations relating to how data is retrieved and stored, caching, scalability, and data load operations are reviewed. Frameworks and architecture decisions related to this are reviewed and selected to ensure that performance considerations are baked into the core architecture. Coding standards and design patterns are put in place to ensure the UI is always responsive and UI data is loaded asynchronously to not freeze the user experience for any amount of time.

Customers are paying to be able to access their data in a standard way using 3rd party tools, and want to write automated scripts to retrieve and access this data. -> Business layer will be accessible to and have a corresponding REST API where all customer data will be accessible through this secure REST API.

We have licensed 3rd party vendors that pay a yearly fee to write and sell reports to our customers. We need an open reporting tool with easy access to report data. -> A technology evaluation is completed and multiple technology vendors are evaluated. The choice is made to use SQL Server Reporting Services to allow other vendors to easily create and sell reports to our customers. Reporting will not be done on the live database to minimize performance impact and mitigate the risk of rogue reports making their way into the reporting module. A separate star-schema analytics server will be deployed that contains aggregated customer data that is suitable for very fast customer reporting with no impact to the live production system.

As part of this process you may need to include specific details about how this will be implemented, measured, how the testing team will test the performance, the specific technology in question and how it will be used, etc. Your project will also need a shared vision of this architecture as the success of the project will depend on ensuring this architecture is maintained throughout the development process.

It should be clear to see that the core-architecture will represent these decisions that will have a big impact on the completed software. Trying to change or implement these core-architecture decisions mid-way through the development process can have vigorous consequences and there will be a refactoring cost that could require months of development time. The worst case scenario is that it could be deemed to be virtually impossible without a major re-write if you have moved too far in another direction.

Could you imagine discovering close to a customer release that your software that was supposed to scale, doesn’t scale? Or that specific functionality doesn’t work when more than a few users are accessing it at the same time? It happens often when the software team was not mature enough to ensure that there was a core-architecture aligned with the key business objectives and ensure that the developed software code was aligned with the core-architecture. These things must be accounted for and mitigated against by your core-architecture and the concepts of the architecture need to be baked into all development decisions made by the team throughout the development process.

If the problems mentioned above happen on your development project it is likely that your core-architecture was incorrect or never established, never followed, or effectively established too late in the development process. These problems alone could easily double or triple your total development costs, cause considerable delay to product shipping, and cost your organization customer and profit losses.

“What about Agile? We don’t do up front architecture in Agile, we do it as needed during our iterations and we follow the last responsible moment design principle in doing so.”

I’m a proponent of agile methodologies, and I’ve seen the great benefits that effective agile teams can have on a development project, but one thing I’ve seen over and over again in many agile environments is the assumption that less (sometimes zero) time should be spent on the architecture up front. The principle itself is sound as removing most up-front design for functional requirements to be developed as slices of functionality throughout the iterations provides a benefit of not over complicating and over architecting code. However, the assumption that we throw away all up-front design is incorrect. Even on agile projects there are significant decisions relating to your core-architecture and key business requirements that need to be made before development begins and other significant decisions that need to be made as early in the development process as possible. These decisions and related architecture need to be reviewed, updated, and maintained throughout the iterative development process.

Agility is fantastic when dealing with functional requirements and the need to respond quickly to changing functional requirements. However, this agility needs to be kept separate from the up-front core-architectural decisions that need to be made that are aligned with the key business objectives and that will help ensure your software products success and conformance to these key business objectives.

Even in agile environments where YAGNI (You aren’t gonna need it) and “build now, refactor later” are the trends, refactoring code too late in the development process in order meet significant design decisions that align with the business objectives is going to cost you. As mentioned earlier, refactoring costs of months and months of development time is the norm for organizations that didn’t account for core-architecture decisions in their development – especially in agile environments where there is a misconception that these architecture decisions were supposed to be made as late in the game as possible.

In many agile implementations, these core-architecture decisions are made too late as they don’t typically relate to a single user story and they end up having a huge technical debt cost because there is a huge cost to change and cost to refactor existing code once the architecture decisions get made. Days, weeks, or months, can be lost to refactoring.

Another problem on some agile teams is what I call “the race to the finish”. Development teams race to satisfy the requirements of the user stories as quickly as possible to ensure they complete the stories within their iteration and to keep their velocity up (average user story points completed per sprint). And although the functional requirements of the user stories are solid and intact, thought isn’t always given to core-architecture decisions such as modularity, scalability, performance, etc, even though the core-architecture is aligned in parallel with the business objectives. Especially, if the core-architecture hasn’t been or has only loosely been defined, you can expect even less consideration, as the focus turns to completing the work as described instead of ensuring the development is in alignment with the core-architecture. To mitigate this in true agile form, agile teams and the product owners need to ensure that business objectives relating to the core architecture are part of the acceptance criteria for the user stories, and that they are thoroughly tested before the testing team can give the “Ok” on the completed user stories.

Depending on the agile team, how experienced they are, and how senior they are, the focus on how and when design decisions are made can also vary, and not every decision needs to be made during the inception of the project. Typically the biggest decisions with the biggest cost to change should be made as early in the software development process as possible. I would make sure 100% that you don’t lose sight of the “architecture” and the significant design decisions of that architecture and how these decisions are aligning with the key business requirements.

In summary, part of a successful architecture for a successful software product will require significant design decisions to be made up front. The bigger the cost of change for the design, the sooner the decision needs to be made and implemented within the solution. Not establishing an architecture can lead to months of wasted development time refactoring code that wasn’t originally aligned with key business objectives such as modularity, performance, and scalability objectives. In agile environments, it’s especially important to ensure that thought is given to up-front architecture to mitigate the cost of refactoring in the future. Establishing and maintaining a core-architecture which is tied in parallel with the key business objectives will go a long way to ensuring a successful product rollout.

Dan Douglas is a professional independent Software Consultant and an experienced and proven subject matter expert, decision maker, and leader in the area of Software Architecture. His professional experience represents over 12 years of architecting and developing highly successful large scale solutions. Dan has been the architect lead on over 15 development projects.

Perhaps you want to learn more about how to establish the architecture, how to present and collaborate with your development team to finalize the architecture and create a shared vision, how to ensure consistency across the architecture, how to bake in non-business requirements such as logging, cross-cutting, and other technical concerns into the architecture.

Or maybe your architecture is established, and your team has done a damn fine job of ensuring the architecture is solid and that it will meet the key business and technology objectives. How do you maintain this? How do you cope with architecture change when it is warranted or when the business changes?

Stay tuned, as I am writing a series of articles on these topics which will be available in the future.

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About dandouglasDan Douglas is based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and is a professional independent Software Consultant and an experienced and proven subject matter expert, decision maker, and leader in the area of Software Development and Architecture. His professional experience represents over 15 years of architecting and developing highly successful large scale solutions. Dan also believes that properly empowering teams with trust and responsibility yields the greatest results.
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For inquiries about Dan's software consulting practice, please see the contact page. Dan has also built up a network of highly successful and professional Software Developers and Architects who are highly respected and can be called upon and used in conjunction with his own consulting practice to handle the largest of consulting projects.

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Dan Douglas is based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and does consulting work for both small organizations and large global organizations through his consulting company, Douglas Information Systems Corporation. He is an experienced and proven subject matter expert, decision maker, and leader in the area of Software Development and Architecture.

With over 16 years of experience, Dan has been the Architect Lead on over 15 development projects and has successfully delivered large scale “best in class” end to end solutions. Dan has developed and architected solutions across a wide vertical, including, government, medical, automative, hr, manufacturing, technology, consulting, and software firms.
Dan writes a lot of code as a hands on developer and is passionate about delivering the right solutions to customers through better code, better architected solutions, better business alignment, and better process.

"My articles are inspired by what's possible. My experience in my software consulting practice has given me the inspiration to write about what I've seen and what I've done, and to write about 'What's possible in software'." - Dan Douglas